Pedro Almodovar has a reputation for being faithful to a handful of actresses who play her heroines, such as Penelope Cruz, but her muse of yesterday, today and tomorrow, is Madrid, a city that now hosts an exhibition dedicated to her love relationship with the great filmmaker of women. “The story of Pedro Almodovar and Madrid is a story of reciprocated love, Pedro Almodóvar is Pedro Almodóvar thanks to Madrid. Their story goes hand in hand,” he explains. Pedro Sanchezcurator of the exhibition Madrid, Almodóvar girlopen to the public in the Spanish capital until October 20.
The 74-year-old filmmaker “has also more than returned to Madrid what it has given him by being his muse, she appears in all of Pedro Almodóvar’s titles, she is his true Almodóvar girl,” adds Sánchez, author of the book All about my Madrid: A walk through Almodóvar’s Madrid.
To host the exhibition, Sánchez saw no better place than the Conde Duque cultural center, in front of whose façade Carmen Maura asked a city employee who cleaned the street to spray it with water The law of Desire (1987). The unforgettable night scene immortalized the actress in her orange dress, suffocated by the summer heat of the city.
“Many people from outside our borders know Madrid or Spain (…) through the films of Pedro Almodovar. Just as they go to the Trevi Fountain in Rome or Amélie’s bar in Paris, they have their first contact with Madrid through its cinematography,” says Sánchez.
With 200 photos from Almodóvar’s 23 films and his personal archives, we can discover the relationship between the artist, born in a town in the Castilla-La Mancha region (central Spain), and the capital.
A panel shows a study on the percentage of action that takes place in Madrid in each film of its cinematography: from 6% (The Skin I Live In, 2011) up to 100% in seven films. “I have never felt like an outsider here,” the filmmaker likes to say, who, according to Sánchez, shares with Madrid “a transgressive, multifaceted, critical, open, fun, cosmopolitan and folksy personality.”
This adopted son of Madrid, currently the most international Spanish filmmaker, did not come from a good family, unlike most of the other artists of the Movida madrileña, the period of sociocultural liberation that followed the death of the dictator. Francisco Franco in 1975 and the advent of democracy.
“In fact, He says that being a filmmaker in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Japan”, laughs the commissioner. Fleeing the Madrid of postcards, he does not hesitate to install his camera in the most working-class neighborhoods, with less obvious beauty, such as Vallecas and Concepción.
If a map of Madrid reproduces the 272 locations used in his films, the exhibition also highlights the places that obsessed the artist: taxis, hardware stores, cemeteries and pharmacies, all of them present in his work. Sometimes, he resorts to artifice to beautify the city. “The colors in Pedro’s films are very important and are completely fictitious. And that comes because he remembers Franco’s Spain in black and white, and one way to take revenge or react against that is by filling his films with color,” says the commissioner.
Visitors can see the sets used in Women at the edge of a nervous attack (1988) to reproduce Pepa’s terrace, with its panoramic views of all of Madrid, which had to be reproduced because a real terrace would never have supported the weight of the filming crew.
“It is an idyllic Madrid” that is seen in Parallel mothers (2021) or in Juliet (2016), where the protagonists live in huge Madrid apartments despite having livelihoods that are not up to that standard. The Almodovarian aesthetic even goes so far as to recreate masterpieces of Magritte, Rothko, Velázquez, Dalí, Titian, Hopper…in the shots of his films, as deciphered in a video.
The filmmaker put a lot of himself into his sets: “The houses of Pedro Almodovar We haven’t seen them in magazines, like other filmmakers do, we’ve seen them in their films,” he says. Pedro Sanchezwhich points out that pain and glory (2019) does reproduce his current apartment in Madrid, with some of his own armchairs.
“Here is my life,” said Almodóvar when visiting the exhibition, before opening to the public, according to Sánchez, who accompanied him on the tour.
Source: AFP
[Fotos: Iglesias Mas / Centro Condeduque / AFP]
